[Nightmare]

A lack of Dark ships 18 years after his concept art for the apollo mk 2 

As awesome as Darks concepts were, there're quite a few takes on a Apollo Mk II.

[Lorric]

Ah yes, the can't jump out if you're being shot up thing. Something that you have to learn the hard way and something that comes up rare enough to forget, and then there's the fact that you can't cancel the jump, so you just have to helplessly watch as your sitting duck ship gets destroyed.

[Colonol Dekker]

I thought you could press alt+Jt again, oh! You mean once the jump point opens?

A lack of Dark ships 18 years after his concept art for the apollo mk 2 

As awesome as Darks concepts were, there're quite a few takes on a Apollo Mk II.

Yes.  But I wanted dark ships.

[Mongoose]

That's why if you find yourself in that situation, you crank engines to max, spam the afterburner, and hope your ship is fast enough to get a few-thousand-meter head start before you try to jump.

[Nightmare]

Yes.  But I wanted dark ships.

The SOF Orpheus is basically a Apollo Mk2 with SOC (like Artemis DH) maps.

[Lorric]

That's why if you find yourself in that situation, you crank engines to max, spam the afterburner, and hope your ship is fast enough to get a few-thousand-meter head start before you try to jump.

If that's not possible because they're faster than me, I've managed to jump out by throwing my ship around until I've got them off my 6 just long enough to cut the engine and hit jump when it's as close to the magic number 40 as possible.

[SL1]

Take this but a working embeded version of it.  :p

Okay, why did up/down/left/right thrust never go that fast for me? What was I doing wrong?

It's consistent, but it is strongly affected by being shot at. You need to reach a particular speed and maintain your heading for several seconds, and being shot at at all will knock you around messing up your speed and direction and delaying the warp. This is obviously on purpose in order to encourage you not to jump out with hostiles still near you (and this might all be wrong if a coder wants to correct me, this is just based on my experience with it).

Does it matter if you're actually getting hit, or just that you're being shot at? I never try to jump when I'm actually getting hit, because that's certain death 99% of the time.

As I learned today, the speed to reach is 40 with a 5% tolerance (So 38-42 range). The time it takes for you to warp out will depend heavily on the acceleration and deceleration of your fighter. The minimum warptime will be 3 seconds.
A WoD example; the Kaze has fast acceleration but slow deceleration. From stand still, it will take only roughly 4 seconds to warp out. But from max afterburner speed, it will take a wooping 13 seconds, and half of that time is waiting for the ship to decelerate from 50 to 40. Because of the exponential acceleration that freespace uses to adjust velocity.

DahBlount today added a feature to customize the '$Target warpout match percent' in game settings.tbl so a higher tolerance value can be set. Which is very nice indeed.

That explains it. If I'm running from enemy fighters and trying to make a quick escape, I'll be close to maximum speed when I hit Alt-J, so the jump will take longer. This is good to know. Thanks.

Ah yes, the can't jump out if you're being shot up thing. Something that you have to learn the hard way and something that comes up rare enough to forget, and then there's the fact that you can't cancel the jump, so you just have to helplessly watch as your sitting duck ship gets destroyed.

I thought you could press alt+Jt again, oh! You mean once the jump point opens?

I don't know if pressing Alt-J again works, but I know that pressing Esc works if you do it before the jump point opens. I'm also pretty sure that you become invulnerable when the jump point opens, because I've had occasions where I could see my ship taking a ton of fire as it entered and it didn't seem to actually do any damage.

[Mongoose]

I'm not actually sure if you're home free when the external camera view triggers.  I was never unlucky enough to die during the sequence, at least.

[Colonol Dekker]

That supernova bit.....half the time

[Firesteel]

My memory's fuzzy with FS1's engine but I don't think you were invulnerable at any point during jump out in the original engine, just immune to physics during the warp out animation. FS2 acts slightly differently (again my memory is fuzzy) or it at least removes the collision volume faster than in FS1.

I remember being able to kill things until the warp flash on the retail engines (I don't remember about FS2's though)

[Mito [PL]]

I remember that when a fighter/bomber was jumping out as soon as the jump flash appeared, the target was semi-transparent to weapon fire until it at least partially made it through the "event horizon" - then, it was possible to get some shots on the ship until the warp flash diappeared.

I'm not sure if it's like that now, but I remember there being something like that at some point.

[Grizzly]

Into the Maelstrom's dialogue seems slightly out of order, with the corvette sending a wing of fighters before one of your wingmen calls Mayday.

[Goober5000]

From a mission designer's point of view, the Hope kamikaziing the Hades in ST:R.  It's a great visual spectacle and it raises the stakes considerably, but it makes little sense on closer examination.

For context, in FS1, the Hades has 800k hitpoints, but in FS2, this was lowered to 400k, probably due to how utterly insane the last mission of the original Silent Threat was.  However, due to the amount of friendly ships in ST:R's final mission, the length of time needed for messages and to present a serious challenge, and the need to have enough hitpoint margin for the Hope's attack to make a significant impact, the Hades's hitpoints were raised back to 800k.  Originally the Hope did 50% of damage, but after playtesting this was reduced to 25%.  Thus, the Hades starts the last mission of ST:R with around 75% of its hull strength, or 600k hitpoints, equivalent to 6 Orion-class destroyers.

The first problem is that realistically, a kamikaze attack should have completely obliterated the Hades.  A massive destroyer colliding at around 200 m/s should have absolutely ripped apart both ships like something out of a Michael Bay film.  And that's only from a structural standpoint: if for some impossible reason some part of the Hades remained intact, there should have been a reactor core breach or similar cascade failure.  Instead, the Hades shrugs off the assault with absolutely no structural deformation, only minor damage, and only a temporary, quickly-repaired engine failure.  If the Hades had been destroyed, there would of course have been no need for the next mission.

The second problem is that opening a subspace portal on top of the Hades should have caused some kind of serious disruption, whether by shattering the hull, sucking part of it into subspace, or cutting a slice out of it like a buzz saw.  Additionally, accelerating the Hope to subspace-jump speeds compounds the momentum problem in the previous paragraph.  But I discovered that without the subspace jump, the Hope spends too long in the vicinity of the Hades before hitting it and exploding.  It kills the momentum of the scene and deflates the tension.

These two points were sources of moderate consternation while I was FREDding the mission, but I decided that Rule of Cool must apply.  And this has been vindicated by the fact that, in all the years since ST:R has been released, not one time has anyone mentioned either of the two problems.

[Trivial Psychic]

Did you test it using just the Hope's arrival momentum to collide the two?

[Goober5000]

IIRC I did.  I believe the Hope and Hades didn't actually collide until they were overlapping for a few seconds, making the dialogue feel somewhat superfluous.  With the subspace jump, there's a very clear distinction between arrival and attack.

[Firesteel]

I think part of why no one pointed out that the Hades should have been obliterated or messed with by subspace forces is probably because it can't happen in the game without some heavy duty model swapping or physics simulation (though you could certainly have had the Hope destroy the Hades). Ships in FS can warp out on top of each other without affecting each other so obviously subspace doesn't pull things into it in that way, as far as the simulation rules go.

So basically what I'm saying is no one has commented on it because of the way the rules surrounding capships work in FS and the Hope X Hades collision obeys all the same rules.

(This is related to my research btw )

[Destiny]

Okay, why did up/down/left/right thrust never go that fast for me? What was I doing wrong?

Spoilers for DE so

Spoiler:

My guess is you probably didn't pick the Phoenix in early of Act 3.

My second guess would be that the nature of the mission when you first flew the Yukikaze meant that you did not really have to test out it's maneuverability, however that's offset by the mission after it, although only for the first half...and then your picked fighter would get it's upgrade and none of 'em boasts much in lateral maneuverability.

Guess that rubs you the wrong way in more than one. Sorry.


But well if you wanna do maneuvers like that for the entirety of a campaign, play the Droid's Dark Souls Singularity campaign instead of the main DE one!

[Iain Baker]

Lack of mid-mission check points in long-ass missions.  Especially ones where you are very likely to die right near the end 


I wish there was a mid-mission save system in Freespace. Then I could get my 'savescum' on

[X3N0-Life-Form]

Hehe, I remember when I first saw "checkpoint reached" in Blue Planet, I was like "Wait what ? Freespace doesn't do checkpoints ???"

[Nightmare]

Make a new thread about things that rubbed you the right way..